"As already established, Doom is 20 years old. In a world where most games have a shelf life of about as long as their graphics engine, the fact that it still attracts players today could be classed as a small miracle.

Despite that popularity, the sequels haven’t also been so successful, particularly Doom 3, released in 2005. While the game was billed as a sequel to Doom 2, it really ought to be classed as a remake, with a more complicated story involving a renegade scientist and much more advanced graphics.

Unfortunately, while anticipation ran high, the game had been rendered unrecognizable. Time magazine noted of the original what made “Doom so great, and so different from today’s shooters, is the way it made players dance around fireballs and dart around corners, rather than landing headshots while popping out of cover.” Doom 3 was nothing like that. To quote popular online video game critic and video blogger Noah Antwiler, “but why do I say that it’s not Doom? Well that’s simple…Doom 3 is a survival horror game right down to its core, almost the complete opposite of every gameplay facet of the previous Doom games good.”

In other words, in attempting to modernize Doom, and force it to conform to prevailing trends, the result only highlighted where modernity fell short. Do we need a better metaphor for every attempt by Washington to “reform” massive systems that it often barely understands? From the byzantine legal entities spawned by McCain-Feingold, to the budget-busting Medicare Part D to the train wreck that is Obamacare, every “modernizing” law Washington passes either creates new problems or actively makes them worse.

This is not to say that nothing in Washington needs reform, but what policymakers could learn from the failure of Doom 3 is that often, in order to understand how to improve something, it’s necessary to first carefully study what must be preserved. In other words, the key to meaningful change is knowing what not to change.

Ultimately, like all great works of art, Doom speaks to all ages and the lessons of its creation and continued success are timeless. If a few of those lessons can trickle into the halls of power, perhaps it will be not just the demons inhabiting the Demos base, but the demons plaguing our politics, that will go down in a burst of BFG fire."

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So the next step is, I presume, equating Doom to early industrial revolution policies: just think about how efficient production was with the quick & dirty working conditions, no worker rights to worry about and ZERO interference from the state, unions, etc. Of course it helped that in fact of politics and civil rights, people could do little more than STFU and suck it down from the King/Queen/Kaiser etc.

Sure, there was a lot of soot, 16-hour shifts, a lot of job-related accidents, injustices etc. but it literally was a revolution and made the West what it is today, and some economists believe that it's the only way to gain competitiveness back. After all, the Chinese still apply it verbatim ;-)

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This seems to be one of the people who think that Doom is just shotty shotty bang bang and nothing else. I deplore and wholeheartedly disagree with this mentality. Doom has never been a pure action or horror game, it was a combination of both, using elements from both when needed to create the unique combination of action AND atmosphere...the part people conveniently forget about all the time. Making Doom 4 a pure action game would be a huge mistake, comparable to making Doom 3 a pure horror game.

Also, Doom 3 is more Doom that people want to realize. It had secrets, some degree of non-linearity and atmosphere. Isn't that what Doomers want? Isn't that what most mappers put in their maps? Now of course, the maps in Doom 3 weren't very good from a gameplay POV, but that's not the point.

This journalist seems like one of those older people who played Doom and Quake in their heyday and therefore thinks he has the authority to dictate what Doom is based on a set of blurry memories. I really hope the people from Id won't listen to the likes of him.

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This seems to be one of the people who think that Doom is just shotty shotty bang bang and nothing else. I deplore and wholeheartedly disagree with this mentality. Doom has never been a pure action or horror game, it was a combination of both, using elements from both when needed to create the unique combination of action AND atmosphere...the part people conveniently forget about all the time. Making Doom 4 a pure action game would be a huge mistake, comparable to making Doom 3 a pure horror game.

Also, Doom 3 is more Doom that people want to realize. It had secrets, some degree of non-linearity and atmosphere. Isn't that what Doomers want? Isn't that what most mappers put in their maps? Now of course, the maps in Doom 3 weren't very good from a gameplay POV, but that's not the point.

This journalist seems like one of those older people who played Doom and Quake in their heyday and therefore thinks he has the authority to dictate what Doom is based on a set of blurry memories. I really hope the people from Id won't listen to the likes of him.

One thing he said that I liked was that before Id (or Washington) focuses on doing something new, they also should consider preserving what still works. Sure, Doom 3 maybe had "some" secrets and a little non-linearity, but it was not nearly as much as in Classic Doom. Doom 3 was also not nearly as fast paced as Classic Doom. Classic Doom's gameplay is so addicting that it's still played to this day.

fraggle said:

Yes.

This is a mind-bendingly bizarre post and I have no idea why you thought it was a good idea.

I thought it was a very creative analogy between Doom and America's modern day politics. It is also the nature of government to try and fix things and instead of fixing it they make it worse.

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So the next step is, I presume, equating Doom to early industrial revolution policies: just think about how efficient production was with the quick & dirty working conditions, no worker rights to worry about and ZERO interference from the state, unions, etc. Of course it helped that in fact of politics and civil rights, people could do little more than STFU and suck it down from the King/Queen/Kaiser etc.

Sure, there was a lot of soot, 16-hour shifts, a lot of job-related accidents, injustices etc. but it literally was a revolution and made the West what it is today, and some economists believe that it's the only way to gain competitiveness back. After all, the Chinese still apply it verbatim ;-)

No, Doom is the Constitution of the FPS genre. Many people over the years have made welcome changes to it, others have made many unwelcome changes that worsened the formula rather than improved it.

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I thought it was a very creative analogy between Doom and America's modern day politics. It is also the nature of government to try and fix things and instead of fixing it they make it worse.

Like most analogies it probably made more sense in your head than when you wrote it down. Try explaining yourself without using "creative analogies" in the future because they're often just a recipe for muddied thinking and confusion.

Comparing Doom to a constitution is another dumb analogy. You're missing the point of what a constitution is, the reason and purpose for their existence. Just stop it.

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doom_is_great said:
It is also the nature of government to try and fix things and instead of fixing it they make it worse.

You're making an analogy for an industry. If anything, the US government mimics its private industries to a large degree, and thus has flaws that are similar to theirs. Whether the State fixes or worsens depends on governance and social factors. If you just generalize about it like that, you're expressing neoliberal dogma or principles, not facts. Nothing wrong with political inclinations, but let's not confuse them with science.

Even if you were to think the id guys were like pioneers and founding fathers, the game industry is not in its "18th century" anymore, so expecting it to act as if it were is delusional, to say the least.

More importantly, our community remains and carries the qualities of the original games just fine, so why do we need media and entertainment corporations to do the same?

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Seems a strange analogy to me. Sure, Doom was a great game and it served us well in its time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't move forward as an industry. Maybe Doom 3 didn't have the timeless charm of the original, but I thought it was pretty damn good.

To go with his analogy, though, he seems to suggest even attempts at progress are fundamentally flawed. So what, companies shouldn't bother even trying to make new games? Just release new level packs for Doom every couple of years? Nostalgia is great, but it only gets you so far. It's easy to be a cynic about the game industry, but some truly terrific games have come out since Doom, games that we never would have seen if we had maintained this "stick your head in the sand and never even consider the notion of progress," attitude.

To go back to the analogy, this guy sounds like an old fogey afraid of change. Yeah, I'm stuck in the past, I constantly play games and listen to music that are as old as I am, if not older, but I acknowledge that change is necessary, that progress is necessary, even if it isn't always good. Risk-taking is an essential element of life. Nostalgia is good, but you can't simply cling to the past like a life preserver, refusing to ever move forward. Sure, health care reform will not be easy, and it might have problems, but to claim that the previous system was perfect and flawless is just absolute nonsense.

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The analogy is flawed regardless of your opinion on classic Doom vs. Doom 3, or old vs. new America, simply because you can put the former pair next to each other, compare them and then pick the one you prefer. Good luck going back in time or staging a revolution to enjoy the good old America.